"You!" the soldier grunted at Chiun. "You know this man?"
"Bu," Chiun said flatly, and returned to his window.
The soldier looked at Zhang again, his face tightening in concentration. Then, removing a rubber truncheon from his belt, he smacked Zhang Zingzong over the head without preamble or warning.
"Dog's eyes!" he shouted in Mandarin. "I know your face!"
Zhang recoiled in his seat, his eyes blinking.
"I am only a worker," Zhang protested meekly.
"Show identification!"
Zhang hung his head. "I have none," he admitted. "It was stolen."
The truncheon went under Zhang's chin, forcing his face up to the light. "Liar!" the PLA soldier hissed.
Zhang said nothing. His hand groped for his knapsack, wedged between the seat divider and his side.
The Master of Sinanju surreptitiously stabbed the hand with a single sharp fingernail. Zhang winced and his hand withdrew.
The PLA soldier saw none of this. He took Zhang by the shoulder and pulled him to his feet.
"You will come with me, man without identity."
The commotion attracted a great deal of attention in the tourist-class car. There were a few muttered protests.
"How can they do that?" a middle-aged man said to his wife. "Just take a person away like that?"
"What I don't understand is, why doesn't he stand up for his rights?" the wife returned.
"Someone should do something," another person added.
Everyone agreed that the man's rights were being trampled upon and someone should do something.
But no one did. The train rolled on.
While the passengers' attention was on the poor figure of Zhang Zingzong, the Master of Sinanju took up the abandoned knapsack and placed it under his seat.
Then he floated out of his seat and up the aisle, after the PLA soldier.
Two cars forward, he came to the hard-seat section, crowded with Chinese passengers. The seats were narrower and without cushions. People sat on one another's laps and on luggage in the aisle, eating from cardboard food containers and drinking warm tea from plaid-design vacuum bottles.
They scrunched out of the way as the PLA soldier marched the silent and teary-eyed Zhang Zingzong toward the engine car.
The Master of Sinanju negotiated the aisle with silent deftness. Few saw him approach, for their eyes were on the unfortunate captive. Chiun breezed past them like a ghost in fiery raiment.
After he had passed, no one could help but notice him, however. For his costume was alien even to China.
Behind the engine was a car dominated by a curtained booth where a khaki-uniformed woman sat behind a microphone and tape-deck system, broadcasting a mix of native folk songs and foreign music to the hard-seat section of the train.
A knot of soldiers was loitering by the booth, laughing and joking with the woman.
Zhang Zingzong was ushered into the official car and slammed down on a rude wooden bench.
He sat there, head downcast, hands folded between his knees, submissive under the hard, accusing glare of his captors.
The other soldiers gathered around. Angrily they began hectoring Zhang Zingzong in high, truculent voices.
Then the Master of Sinanju appeared in the rattling car.
One soldier noticed him only because he turned away to light a cigarette. His eyes narrowed at the sight of the aged Korean.
Face placid, the Master of Sinanju beckoned to the soldier.
The soldier hesitated briefly. He pocketed his unlit cigarette and strode up to the Master of Sinanju.
"What you do here, old tortoise?" he demanded.
"Please," Chiun said in flowery Mandarin, "do not shout at this unworthy one, for my ears are very old and sensitive. I have something of importance to impart to you concerning that murderer." Chiun indicated Zhang with a fluttery fingernail.
"He is a murderer?"
"There is a body in the car behind us," Chiun hissed.
"Show me!" the soldier said, tight-voiced.
The Master of Sinanju swirled his skirts turning around. He floated down the aisle, the soldier stepping on feet and knocking over luggage as he stumbled after him.
Chiun stopped before a luggage alcove.
"In here," he said, drawing the curtain aside.
The soldier looked in, holding on to the edge of the alcove as the train rattled along.
"I see no body," the soldier said.
A shiny knuckle connected with the base of the soldier's skull. He collapsed without a sound.
The Master of Sinanju folded the soldier's legs so that they did not stick out. He let the curtain fall.
Then, his face innocent, he padded back to the official car.
There, they were still haranguing Zhang Zingzong.
The Master of Sinanju selected a soldier and tugged on his green sleeve. The soldier bent down and accepted the Master of Sinanju's breathily urgent words whispered in his ear.
He followed him back to look at the body promised to be there. It was the last sight he beheld before his brain died.
He had short legs. Chiun hooked the PLA-issue boots to restraining straps, so they stayed out of sight.
At first, the next soldier did not believe that there were two bodies in the next car. He turned to his comrades and repeated the old Korean's claim.
"This old one says there are dead passengers in the next car."
The soldiers gathered around the Master of Sinanju.
"How could this be?" one said skeptically. "Someone would have complained before this."
"I am sorry," said the Master of Sinanju, spreading his vermilion-and-lavender kimono sleeves. "Did you think I said the next car? I meant the last car. My Mandarin is poor."
"The last car is empty, but for luggage," he was told.
"There are two bodies there."
"I do not believe you."
"PLA bodies," Chiun added blandly.
That did it.
After a hasty exchange of words, they decided to follow the old Asian to the last car. One man-the one who had arrested Zhang in the first place-agreed to stay with the prisoner. He was not happy about it. He wanted to see the bodies too.
The Master of Sinanju allowed the PLA soldiers to go ahead of him. They stampeded through the rattling, swaying cars like a caterpillar of many unsmiling heads.
The train began rounding a sharp turn, forcing the chain of stumbling soldiers to grab at seat backs and overhead racks.
Eventually they made it to the rear car, carefully negotiating the bumping steel platforms which joined the caboose to the rest of the train.
The soldiers burst in. Seeing nothing in the gloomy caboose, they proceeded to toss luggage around and upend packages, looking for the bodies.
One turned an angry face in the direction of the Master of Sinanju who stood serene on the bouncing platform between the cars.
"Where are the bodies!" he demanded.
"I am looking at them," intoned the Master of Sinanju. And he stamped his foot once. The coupling below cracked with a clank, separating the caboose from the train.
The soldiers were abruptly thrown off their feet as the last car lost momentum and slowed.
Then the caboose rolled backward. It gathered speed until it hit the sharp turn the train had just negotiated.
It jumped the rails and turned over twice, throwing off bits of iron and wood and luggage. And broken green bodies.
Pleased the Master of Sinanju began to work his way back to the front of the train, where the final soldier's body lay, ripe for the harvesting.
Chapter 13
The moment Remo Williams stepped off the jetway ramp and into the congested Beijing airport, it all came back to him.
A sea of Chinese faces swam before him like biscuits with eyes and mouths. It wasn't, as the old expression went, that they all looked alike. It was that the Chinese people, used to centuries of obedience, presented similar inoffensive masks to the world their expressions uniformly bland.